Visions of Cody

by Jack Kerouac

  The headline reads (as follows) Arrumph, Kaff!

  PEYOTL IS TOTAL Essay on Cody Pomeray

  Part I Beyond Cody There are

  only Thieves, the Sins

  of America be Damned.

  HAVE YOU EVER KICKED A REEFER?

  Ball Hits Fence

  in Middle Board…………(what I used to do, throw a rubber ball, after

  supper, at a board in the broken window of the neighbor barn and when I hit it flush in the middle it was a strike, when I barely missed and it hit the protrudent shelf and flew off into the air, it was a hit, a fly ball, which sometimes I caught to make the put out; thus being pitcher and outfield, center fielder, really, plumb at the same time.

  For this memory I didn’t have to go back to dear old Compton my hometown; Jack L. Duluoz, Compton, Calif. (LOCAL BOY INDICTED FOR FORGERY)

  But it’s still quite essential to follow:

  Extra News! Billoboard running over, oh Billboard Running over, O Billboard, Oh Gilgo, O

  Walking one Time ‘Cross

  the City of Providence (where they used to cut the turkey’s head off)

  PROVIDENCE AWAITS THY SENSES FOR ‘TIS WITHOUT SAID PROVIDENCE WE DIE

  Then three balls not unlike the balls of a—an old Jewish without a capital W pawnballer, ballpawner, so fat and thick on balls he oozes munificence—but I dawdle, to go on—

  FAGS ANONYMOUS especially me and the lit ones (this does not mean literary, it means lit with a match)

  It’s so cold in Suskahooty that you can’t see across the river; northern Canada, y’know; (I spied a young lady in yon, yon, yon)

  Wm Rn Hearst didn’t have as m—

  Nobody digs my dog like I my dog dig

  But of course I don’t have to go through all that, we’ll t—when we’re bloody well finished or shall I wait for the early morning fog when equestriennes clad only in skin fighting tideropes…I have seen the rp, the proud ladies of the Hore Show, Horse Show, I have seen, but I have seen, typing is a goof

  FRANK GOFF WAS THE NAME OF THE CATCHER FOR THE PHILADELPHIA PONTIACS. YOU’VE GOT TO MAKE UP YOUR GODDAMN MIND IF YOU WANT TO GOOF OR DON’T WANT TO GOOF OR WANT TO STAY ON ONE LEVEL KICK OR GOOF AND KICK ALONG MISSPELLING AND

  I had conceived of Art Rodrigue in this fashion; Art Rodrigue the first baseman for the Philadelphia Pontiacs; but don’t explain any further; he was just like Al Robert, but Portuguese of course and so invested with that particular raw power they showed on sundrowsed porches of mid Moody afternoon, sometimes with guitars with which they imitated American and Western kicks but were really, as only Saroyan knows, hung on, or hung behind, their own great homeland kicks. Same with the Canadians…the guitar for them was a sign of—but wait, I was on the Portuguese, and Art Rodrigue; for some reason too, this Art Rodrigue was to be exactly, to look exactly, infinitely perfectly like Al Robert, the same big tanned seriousness, like the last firstbaseman I saw, the last ballgame I saw, so beat am I, was a Class D league game down in Kinston, North Carolina and where, true to God by Gawrsh, like I say, the first baseman, H. W. Mercer, was tall and tanned and morose and serious and mooning for Hollywood, that is, to eventually become a movie actor, like say, Gene Bearden of the ideal minor league ballplayers of the movies and even of Ring Anderson by Gawrsh, you know, Ring Anderson, who wrote the Magnificent Andersons. Well by God, Art Rodrigue was going to look exactly like Skippy Al Robert; and so, especially because he wore this light cream and orange uniform of the Pontiacs his dark face particularly glowed on the green and dazzling playingfield of afternoon when men squint to see the wheat and the day. At night, I had no doubt as I lay in my bed, Art Rodrigue and other ball players throughout the league, imaginary as it was, went out and spent evenings with naked and willing women; I could even see Art Rodrigue sitting facing a naked Armenian girl sitting on a Cape Cod settee with a book and great perfect breasts standing regardant and soft, not regardant like lions, nor soft jelly, no Katzenjammer Kids or Animal Crackers or Zoo Parades, but firm and powerful; and so on; Art Rodrigue, who, in drowsy afternoons when the clouds over Massachusetts floated past the upper panes of my window where I could see through the side of the curtain, and knew, as I say, that I had some immortal cloudy destiny somewhere behind and forwards of me still to deal with and yet a destiny so soft and fleecy, i.e., like the clouds, that I had nothing to do but notice them and turn away to further and dustier endeavors of the present and of the events of the living world. The inestimable Latin-ness of my Art Rodrigue, and of the Pontiac baseball team in general (crayoned in orange, position by position, on an ordinary card, slightly glossy, from the father’s office, the printing office, see) and the Latinness even of my Summer League, as it were a tennis-and-knickers-Barnstable Cape Cod league coolness, I made this ah, now I’m talking, this summer league called…well damn, I forgot the name, just as I forget the exact number of tin cans in the small dump in back of the Rockingham race track the gray misty day Mike and me found a ripe tomato growing among the empty whiskey bottles and ate it raw without salt and without benefit of the Pope’s advice about salt; but (and as the races were run off to roars we couldn’t see); the names of the teams in the summerleague were Tydol, Gulf, Texaco (not Texcoco, I wasn’t with the Indian yet); Peyotl, no, not Peyotl, another gas, to be sure not an off brand gas, or grass, any more than I would sell you any bad shit or Shell you one; names (before J.C.) which were so soft and orange and yielding to my couch, to my kicks, I lay there, twelve, high on the colors of the imaginary uniforms of imaginary baseball teams on cards; and hungup too and more vitally than ever now, the color of the great silks of great proud socialite stables, like C. V. Whitney “Light Blue and Brown” (who but C. V. Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, would dig the greatness of Light Blue and Brown, shirt is blue, hat brown, indistinguishable through field glasses on flowery bright afternoons) (in those days, between races, they played records and of course to make it racetrack-cool they played what were then fairly oldish or sentimental records, Rudy Vallee “A Pretty Girl…”, like we play Sinatra now we who swooned over him on the road, in the street, out in back of the Beverly Hills Alpine cocktail lounge where the faint strains of Artie Shaw’s clarinet seep out to knock up a young painter hurrying from one easel to another thinking of peyotl and color); hungup I was too, on the greatest of the great silks of the American turf, the colors of the owner of Omaha, winner of the 1935 Kentucky Derby, Woodward, red polkadots on white silks; although you might think the Cream and Cerise of MY daydream stable would, ahem, surpass that; hungup on the Harold Paine Whitney silks, which I remember had a stripe of black in a faint borscht silk field, wow, with regardant 1066’s from Oakland called Norman.

  But the league, when it transpired in the afternoon, had a life of its own; at night it no longer occupied my (me), it was the thing for next afternoon; at night, I was hungup on the great darkness beyond the street lamp out in the dirtroad front of the house, which was under the greatest hugest tree in the world, it had a SWish to it you could hear clear to Sacramento, Calif. and I ain’t talking about Compton, either; for you know I’d never abandon my old hometown Lowell when telling what I know about noble trees. Afternoon or evening, that tree had ’em all beat. Why, I remember the night Mr. Hoorair from across the street got mad at little Pinky-Winky whose name don’t remember but he did something wrong, I’ll say, he was my slave, he groveled at my feet in my kitchen as I sat there with my Operator 5’s and Secret Agent X-9 cartoons (although by then that phase, of drawing Secret Agent X-9 in particular—I think my last and most unsuccessful and quick to die cartoon conception and Hero was a guy called “Pecker”—like decline of a civilization—think of that); but I remember that kid being given hell, leaning on the fence, under the tree, while the man gives him the finger and gives him hell, for something, as the great tree swishes over them in the high mysterious breeze of evening. Did I dig evening? is that a question to ask? I slept on the porch, I had covers on the swinging swing; the boughs of the
great tree did all the creaking for me; and soft the voices of the winds came from over the grasses of Dracut Tiger Field now cooing to the wild sound of crickets and maybe even the wild sound of a seatspring lurching in lovers-lane backseat of a car parked beneath homeplate pine, and dew; the wind came across that, laden with news of upper woods and places where farmers like Robert Frost slammed barndoors in the early morning and made a sound that would echo clear across two or three properties and subsidiary forests and small rivers, brooks really, running brooks with small rapids, that however in sullen Marches could swell and flood and terrify the wood, I mean, till you expected to see corpses go nudging up to the hump that was once the base of a summer diving board; wherewith, and sooth, in fine, I have dreamed of these woods and those floods and of great symbolic voyages as profound as the Odyssey of a brakeman that begins with a call to deadhead over to so and so and he has to provide, but—and it was Cody I was coming to, then, but as reference and maybe fillup; Africa was never longer than some of the treklands I suffered in the Pine Brook country of my dreams; so came the sweet night wind from those waters, and from the field, and mossed and hugened into movement the great groaning, tossing tree, so martyred, so longfaced a tree that I was not surprised but only apprised of normal laws of doom when it toppled like a matchstick in a fury-fury hurricane, October, 1938, the month and almost the week, if not definitely the week, of Thomas Wolfe’s death.

  That afternoon began, in fact, the hurricane afternoon, clearly enough with the sudden riptide pace of thin, snaveled clouds across the glary pale above; to add to all that horror, of clouds racing so fast too that you didn’t quite believe it and looked twice like at a comedian in a B-movie, a doubletake; so sinister an afternoon and introductory disaster that on the way home, in the grayness of Aiken Street near the dump, a telephone pole had caught on fire and the engines were lined up putting out the fire with their hoses; engines and men that within an hour or two would suddenly be alerted as everybody and the authorities in a simultaneous amazement would realize that a fullscale hurricane was upon this northern manufacturing town in New England. To this day, in the wild and virginal woods near Athol, and in the West, in the Berkshires, in the dismalest swamps east of Hartford or west of Worcester, or northeast of Springfield, or outside raw, gloomy Fitchburg of the crags and wild pine, great tree trunks lie bent on the ground as a result of that Hurricane of 1938…just drive at night, hitch-hike at night outside Billerica, Mass. and let that old B & M brakeman who goes to St. Margaret’s church in the Highlands of Lowell on Sunday morning tell about the havoc he saw then and still sees signs of in the forest as on the trains he plies his living back and forth in the darkness and coalsmoke of the night. I knew a guy like that, Cudfield, but to get back, though, to the gray and bleak tragedy of that burning telephone pole I’ll never know why it looked so foreboding to me or how I could have felt the impending fury and horror (well it was horror to some, those who lost property and even those without property who don’t understand why God sends terrible storms on people, don’t gloat on sea walls in the winter or ride bicycles to Switzerland from a spinning plate of anchovies (Humph); but enough, let us sleep now, let us ascertain, in the morning, if there is a way of abstracting the interesting paragraphs of material in all this running consciousness stream that can be used as the progressing lightning chapters of a great essay about the wonders of the world as it continually flashes up in retrospect; as, for example, this night I ran cold water into a glass at the sink while everybody was high and immediately was reminded completely and perfectly of the cool exact waters of Pine Brook on a summer afternoon.

  * * *

  MIKE’S BROTHER WAS SO STRANGE that when he was locked in the attic one time he scratched on the door to be let out. He was Roland, well dressed and incapable of finishing a thought without a smile; thin, small Roland with his dark curly hair and sharp-cheeked smile. Trouble in the family centered around them because they were deadly enemies. Mike hated his guts and tried to admire him while Roland, far from caring, was at the same time completely suffering and unable to rest. Mike was a merchant seaman.

  The family was on to them. Jane…or Crazy Jane, as Roland called her…was amused but enlightened. “Oh well, as far as my brothers are concerned I’ve never had any really, but I can say, if you like, what perfect idiots!” She knew more about their problems than anyone. On the other hand, another sister knew nothing about their problem but took it upon herself to assume the responsibility for it: this was

  I used to be so cool with my books and records at night in my college room; one Sunday afternoon, too, I saw a boy and a girl in love walking hand in hand across the campus, he up on a wall, she on the pavement, tripping in the rippling airs of afternoon and swash bells from the Cathedrals of Morningside Heights. “I say,” I’d say on the esplanade along the Hudson River, Riverside Drive, “how about a light, sir?” and the gentleman in the bowler hat by God would give me a light. I read the Sunday comics one afternoon on a Riverside Drive parkbench; it was pleasant, it was an early moment of mine in New York when reading the funnies on a bench was synonymous, like an idea, with baby carriages and maids and mothers. I’ve since learned that they’ll hide machine guns in baby carriages—who put suspicion in—what was the name of that bum who stole the housewife’s steaming pie from her kitchen windersill? In America, the idea of going to college is just like the idea of prosperity is just around the corner, it was supposed to solve something or everything or something because all you had to do was larn what they taught and then everything else was going to be handled; instead of that, and just like prosperity that was never around the corner but a couple miles at least (and false prosperity—) going to college by acquainting me with all the mad elements of life, such as the sensibilities, books, arts, histories of madness, and fashions, has not only made it impossible for me to learn simple tricks of how to earn a living but has deprived me of my one-time innocent belief in my own thoughts that used to make me handle my own destiny. So now I sit and stew in a sophistication which has taken hold of me just exactly like a disease and makes me lie around like a bum all day long and stay up all night goofing with myself. I had thought, in, and before college, that to be a writer was like being, of course, the émile Zola of the film they made about him with Paul Muni shouting angrily in the streets at the dumb and stupid masses, as if he knew everything and they didn’t know a damn thing; instead of that I wonder what working people think of me when they hear my typewriter clacking in the middle of the night or what they think I’m up to when I take walks at 2 A.M. in outlying suburban neighborhoods—the truth is I haven’t a single thing to wr—feel foolish…. How I wish I could grow corn tomorrow morning! How I wish I had enough patience to go and meet Farmer Brown in two hours from now, 5 A.M., and go learn early morning farming matters from him, and sober, too; and not high on tea, either. Instead of that I give myself tremendous headaches and I am also less paid than a Mexican in New Mexico, and at least the Mexican in New Mexico has the right to get angry and to feel truly righteous in his heart. If I went for righteousness at the face of God on what grounds could I make such a claim?—where plant my stick? What’s happened to our society or our arrangement of living and trading with one another that without the feeling of righteousness you shrivel away like a pru—I feel so damned small and sick, I walk into a bar not feeling right any more, I used to walk in a bar with a swagger, that’s what bars are for, if not swagger outright I just mean walking in without paying attention to anything but what you’re doing with your friends and with your own thoughts; now, it seems we all walk into bars with fear and suspicion and for that reason I haven’t been to a bar for a long time because only just now I’ve arrived in a strange city and don’t know anyone really. I feel as though everything used to be alright; and now everything is automatically—bad. I even look back on 1950, a year when I sm—when I was getting a certain kind of virgin kick on T—stowing away random thoughts, even short phrases, or single crazy words lik
e “Blood” or “Wow” so that I couldn’t forget them when it came around time to—with bumkick denials of what at that time then I thought were undoubted truths. I’ve made everything bad myself by forgetting to order that coal for the winter; by God we can’t use wood in the city streets, we can’t patch up the window with cardboard, the price of candles is going up! You can’t even go and buy seven caramels for a penny even though some of them used to have something that was like rocks in them, one in a thousand…in fact much more than the old naturalistic fishheads and bananas in a bowl. (Two thoughts rushed to the fore but I have to push them back, one concerned my aunt’s livingroom in Lynn, Mass. when I used to see such a brown and dull red painting of fruit and fish or grapes or fowl, that’s it, not fish, fowl, in the gloom of lace curtains and beads, while in the corner there hung suspended also my uncle’s sword which for years I thought he had wielded in some Boer War or Spanish War or something though I couldn’t find it in my history and knew of course it had nothing to do with the World War I there were no such swords in that war, only to find it had been handed to him on a velvet pillow by some Fezzed society of the pre-Twenties eras when the Masons and the Lions were on the roar just starting to make a big Kiwanis about everything…that poor uncle, too, who committed suicide; and whose chief fame in my little mind previous to that lay in the fact that he was such a champion ice cream eater, sundaes and sodas and splits and all, that members of the family used to trail him to count the number of times. Those first visions of the world seen from a college window, in the safety of that, which were so melancholy yet at the same time so fine and so cool that you go to sleep on them with a smile so to speak (I go to sleep on present anxieties with a nervous smile) must have been more comforting than the ones I have now because I am now so frightened and feel so strange about everything. If it was a matter of hitch-hiking—the comfortable and beautiful darkness of a good old (evil) college campus, where lights burn so softly and goldenly at evening, especially in winter dusks, when the air is so clear the bells of novena rap out with a keen and pristine clang that socks across the air like ice and you pause a-snifflin before some Englishified little window full of books or Brooks Brothers shirts that you don’t even have to buy, just look at. In those days I must have been happy, to have such memories of it now, to be able in fact even to save one memory out of it, that it wasn’t buried like all my happy moments of now are buried the moment they spring up, so that I don’t remember a thing the next day and am only ready to face new sorrows. In those days I must have been a regular student wandering in thought among the shops and windows, like in Poe or Melville. In fact, yes by God I was; I worked as a waiter in a basement Bohemian restaurant with candles on oilcloths in Greenwich Village and got high with the dishwasher in the kitchen on tea, talk and dancing, the dancing he did himself, he was an African primitive dancer, his hands were long as nails, he was a colored maniac; I’d muse on him as I wended my way snow-ward. Not soon after that, though, I’ll bet I began to look around. The sins of America are precisely that the streets…are empty where their houses are, there’s no sense of neighborhood anymore, a neighborhood quarter or a neighborhood freeforall fight between two streets of young husbands is no longer possible except I think in Dagwood Bumstead and he ain’t for real, he couldn’t—beyond this old honesty there can only be thieves. What is it now, that a well-dressed man who is a plumber in the Plumber’s Union by day, and a beat-dressed man who is a retired barber meet on the street and think of each other wrong, as the law, or panhandler, or some such cubbyhole identification, worse than that, things like homosexual, or dopefiend, or dope pusher, or mugger, or even Communist and look away from each other’s eyes with great tense movements of their neck muscles at the moment when their eyes are about to meet in the normal way that eyes meet on the street, and sometimes with their arm muscles all tense too from the feeling that there might have been contact, which arises from the vague abstract mental suspicion that there’s going to be a sudden fistfight or assault with deadly weapon intent, followed by the same old excuses when the moment of meeting is past and both parties realize it was just two fears meeting on the street, not two sacrifices, really, to coin a ph—or explain it that way. Looking at a man in the eye is now queer. Why else should you be looking a m. in thee. If you want to find out if he’s going to cheat you, go ask his psychiatrist, he’s got all the records available.